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ITALERI 1/72 B-57B CANBERRA
Reviewer: Kevin Ronayne (kevin.ronayne@nuigalway.ie)
Kit Review submitted:
28 September 2001
The Canberra was one of the first generation of dedicated jet bombers, with design work beginning as early as 1945. The Canberra was developed by English Electric, who at the time had relatively little experience in actual design and development, although they had built more than 2,000 Halifax heavy bombers under licence during the Second World War II. The Canberra was intended as a replacement for the de Havilland Mosquito in the altitude bomber role. Preliminary deign work went through a number of alternative configurations, including wing root engines, before the final configuration was arrived at. It was originally designed as a two-seat bomber, with the pilot and navigator housed under a wide one-piece canopy. Delays in the development of bombing radar led to the introduction of a small transparent nose glazing, through which a third crew member would act as a bombardier. The first prototype aircraft flew in 1949, and the Canberra, as it was now named, entered RAF service in 1951. Here is neither the time nor the place to go into the development history of the British Canberra, or it's lengthy use by the RAF and other air forces. Instead, it's time to hop across the pond ...
The development of the Canberra came at a very opportune time, as the US Air Force were in the market for a jet replacement for the Douglas B-26 Invader. This is not to be confused with the Martin Marauder, which carried the B-26 designation during WW II, when the Douglas aircraft was the A-26! As time was of the essence, only existing designs were to be considered, including foreign aircraft. Aircraft that were considered and rejected included the Douglas AJ Savage, the B-45 Tornado and a projected bomber version of the Canadian CF-100 all-weather fighter. Eventually, it came down to the Canberra and the Martin XB-51 three-jet bomber design. As the British would have been unable to produce enough Canberra's to meet possible US demand, Glenn Martin would build the type under licence if it's XB-51 design lost out. The Canberra eventually won out, with an agreement for Martin to build 250 B-57A Canberra aircraft under license. The initial B-57A variant was similar to the British aircraft, but with licence-built Sapphire engines instead of Rolls-Royce Avon's. The B-57A also introduced the distinctive rotating bomb bay, which had been a feature of the failed XB-51 design.
Only a handful of -A's were built, before a range of improvements were deemed to be called for. These were incorporated into the B-57B, which became by far and away the dominant B-57 version. Along with a whole raft of new and improved avionics and other internal equipment, there were more obvious changes. The -B introduced the two-seat tandem cockpit, and fuselage airbrakes aft of the wings. Wing guns were also installed in the wing sections just outside the engines. The fit was initially 4 x .5 in machine guns per wing, but this was changed during the production run to 2 x 20 mm cannon per wing.
After some years in service, the B-57B eventually saw considerable active service in Vietnam from 1965 to 1969. It operated mainly in the interdiction role (day and night). Apart from the -B, there were a few other variants of note. The RB-57D was a high-altitude reconnaissance version with a much-increased wingspan. The B-57E was initially developed as a target-towing version, but this requirement eventually disappeared with the introduction of air-to-air guided missiles. B-57E's were converted to EB-57E for ECM and other work, although some of these were eventually reconfigured as -B's to cover combat losses. A few -E's were eventually modified as RB-57E's, and took part in the secretive Patricia Lynn project in Vietnam until 1971, flying nighttime reconnaissance missions. The final significant version was the B-57G, which was a modified B-57B. The modification involved the installation of laser guidance systems, infrared sensors and other equipment, including low-light television equipment in distinctive chins under the nose. About 16 aircraft were so configured. During operations in Vietnam, B-57G's carried 'smart' weapons such as the Paveway laser-guided bomb, provided useful information about the use of such weapons systems.
This is a classic Italeri kit from the early or mid-1980's. This is when Italeri were in their most imaginative phase. In common with other major kit manufacturers, they have gradually become much more conservative in terms of subject matter and indeed in terms of subject size - the molds of aircraft such as the C-119, B-58, CG-4 Hadrian and Me 323 are all from a bygone age.
All right, that's enough editorial ranting for now! This kit is physically unchanged from the original release, and still has the same three subject options. The re-packaging has involved new box artwork, an improved instruction leaflet and better quality decals. Those familiar with Italeri will find no surprises here. The kit comes in a big two-piece box, with two main sprues in light gray, and lightly raised detail for the most part. There is one small enclosed transparency sprue. There is no internal bagging or separation of parts. The total number of parts is 118 - or more, if you count the extra parts generated by building a model with lowered undercarriage and separated flaps. The transparency sprue holds an unacknowledged extra part for another version, with the Italeri catalogue number 174 - this kit is no. 144. I really should know more about the Italeri back-catalogue, but I must admit that I don't know for certain what version the 'other' kit is. I suspect that it is a B-57G. Along with a variety of other evidence, there was a Testors 1/72 kit of the B-57G - and we know that Testors and Italeri were always re-boxing each others' kits.
With thanks to Marcelo Rabello
for supplying the following boxart,
The Italeri "B" kit has indeed been reboxed by Testors as suggested -
Ed
As I said already, the subject options in this kit are the same as before, but with proper unit information this time. They are:
The instruction leaflet is a very comprehensive 10-page sub-A5 size leaflet. There is the usual sprue diagram, full painting guide (with complete FS/Model Master references), and a very good construction guide. Although there are only seven main steps listed, there are just a couple of confusing points, and these have little to do with the brevity of the instructions. There are full-page four-way views of each subject for painting and decaling. The decal sheet is now manufactured by Zanchetti, as opposed to Italeri's old decal sheet manufacturer, Cartograf. Although both the new instructions and decals are generally an improvement, there are a couple of points to consider, especially in relation to the instructions. I'll address those later on. One thing that hasn't changed is ordnance: there is a full load of nine 500 lb. bombs for the main bomb bay, plus four Mk 117 750 lb. bombs for the wing stations, plus four pairs of stacked 5-in rockets. Not forgetting those distinctive wingtip fuel tanks. All this for about IR£ 10/ STG£ 8 - very reasonable, as one would expect from Italeri.
One final note: a couple of years ago, Airfix released a kit of the B-57B/RB-57E - since discontinued, but probably still available. Although Airfix now rebox Italeri kits, this has only begun to happen recently. Therefore, I would guess that the Airfix B-57B/RB-57E is a conversion of their existing RAF B(I).6/RAAF B.20 tooling. I could well be wrong though, as the reboxing arrangement might have been in existence for some time before I became aware of it. It is also perhaps unlikely that Airfix would have been prepared to change the old mold beyond redemption, being the best RAF Canberra kit available, and therefore potentially quite valuable.
Addendum: As luck would have it, I came across the Airfix kit a couple of days *AFTER* submitting the review. I can now confirm for certain that the Airfix kit is a conversion of their original tooling - my first guess was correct. As a result, the Airfix kit should be avoided at all costs.
Before I begin, I need to point out that I'm not going to describe the building process exactly as it occurred. I followed the instruction sequence only when it was strictly necessary, and apart from that I did pretty much as I pleased. I had several different assemblies and sub-assemblies 'in the works' at any one time, all designed to reduce the amount of time spent waiting for something to set or dry, as the case might be. I know this is common practice amongst modellers, but it sometimes results in a construction effort that can't be clearly described if one sticks to describing events in the sequence in which they occurred. In this case, I found this to be a very enjoyable build from the outset, and I decided I was going to invest as much time as required in the short term to get to the finished article as soon as possible - if that doesn't sound like a contradiction!
I decided to build a model with all possible complexity included - wheels down, airbrakes open, bomb-bay open, and flaps deployed. You don't often get a flaps option in 1/72 scale, so I wasn't going to pass up this chance. I began by attaching the single-piece bath cockpit to one of the fuselage sides. Tests showed that this would fit properly within the enclosed fuselage, but it needed to be held in place whilst setting. The deep nosewheel bay was also attached at this time, although this needed a small amount of filler along the sides. The nose ballast was attached top of the nosewheel bay. Just in case, I put some more on top of the forward section of the bomb bay, which was to be attached later. Although this would have had relatively little impact (being so close to the centre of gravity), it turned out to be vital in the end. Assembling the fuselage halves resulted in no fit problems of note, so it was on to the wings.
Each lower wing-half has four pairs of drill-out holes for the underwing pylons. The inner sets of pylons are for the 750-lb bomb pylons, and are to be drilled out for all three versions. The outer holes are for the pairs of stacked 5-inch rockets, and should only be opened for the French-based aircraft (version B). Step 4 gives this the other way around when indicating what holes to open - oddly, the old instruction leaflet was right. Each lower wing includes two flap sections, on either side of the engine. The flap upper surfaces and the upper wing undersurfaces are both very well detailed. The instructions suggest that you only need to cut away at the flap/wing junction and push the flap into place - no guidance on the amount of droop is given. In practice that was not going to work, so I removed the flaps completely, cleaned up all the edges, and kept the pieces for later.
The wing halves went together with no fit problems. Once set, I attached them to the fuselage, to get the basic 'shell' of the aircraft as soon as possible. Each wing root fits into socket in the side of the fuselage , which should result in a seamless (and sturdy) join. There was some filler required around the edges of the wing/fuselage join. As a result, some attention was also required to ensure that the wings set at exactly the correct angle - the correct angle has the wing leading edge parallel to the ground. The tailplane pieces had slots that should ensure a correct angle of attachment to the fuselage. Again, there was some 'give' here, which meant that more filler was required around the root, and attention needed to get the pieces to set in the proper position. Next was the rotating bomb-bay. The kit has parts for both closed and open positions, and I used the latter. You need to be careful putting this in place - the position of the bomb attachment points mean that there is only one correct way, yet there is nothing really to stop you putting it in back-to-front if you're not careful. Dry fit some bomb parts first! The bomb bay has doors that partially protrude even when in the open position - which is correct. There was a slight gap between the doors and the fuselage. I cleaned out any glue and other crud to give a clean gap, to give an illusion of the small gap that probably existed in real life between door and fuselage.
At this point I may as well describe the rest of the bomb-bay work. The nine 500-lb bombs are each in two halves. Most of the pieces had plug marks on the inside of the fin angle. These had to be painstakingly removed with various types of blades. Personally, I don't mind something like this at all, as long as the accuracy and detail is not affected, which it wasn't here. I often find that it makes the final result all the more rewarding! The bomb halves were assembled and painted olive drab (FS 34087, or Humbrol 155). There were no instructions on painting fuses or bands. I painted the nose fuses silver, and, based on photographs, painted two yellow bands near the rear of each casing. The entire bay was painted chromate yellow (Hu 81), including (contrary to the boxart) the parts of the bay doors that protruded when open. This was also done based on photographic evidence, and seems to make sense: the doors would only have been briefly been visible when open, so they would probably not have had to be painted to match the camouflage scheme. When I tried to attach the bombs, I realised the fins were slightly too wide. All bombs had to be removed, their fins cropped, cleaned up, and re-attached.
Let's get back to the wings. There is a small leading-edge section containing the gun ports to be attached just outside each engine. Each piece has two sets of drill-out holes: one set far apart, right on the leading edge, and a second set closer together, placed slightly below the leading edge. The instructions direct that the lower pairs be opened, yet they clearly show the other pairs of holes being open also. As stated earlier, B-57B's could be armed either with 4 x .5 in machine guns or 2 x 20 mm cannon in each wing. Judging by the serial numbers, I am fairly confident that each of the three subjects was cannon-armed. Pictures and plates seem to show that the holes right on the leading edge should be used, and the box artwork agrees with this - so that's what I did. A further complication is that the 20 mm cannon were depressed a few degrees to aid in ground strafing, but this does not imply that the ports should be well below the leading edge, especially with such thick wings.
Each engine has a separate compressor face with blades - the face was painted gunmetal (Hu 53), a few minutes after undercoating with silver. This gives a more realistic 'metallic' finish in this situation than just plain gunmetal. The large blades and fairing in front of the compressor faces were painted silver. Over this piece went a circular intake cowling, The insides of the intakes and the separate tailpipe pieces were all painted black. The instructions suggest that the tailpipe exteriors should be painted burnished metal, but it seems more likely they would have been mostly painted over with the camouflage scheme. Finally, each engine has a small 'chin' intake piece, which needed to be manually positioned, and required a small amount of filler.
Next came the correctly-shaped wingtip navigation lights - I painted the wing attachment areas green and red, rather than painting the transparencies themselves. Like the gun fairings, one of the lights fitted perfectly, while the other needed a bit of pruning. Each wingtip tanks consists of two parts, with the upper section having different parts for starboard and port. There are no locating marks, pins or slots anywhere - you just have to align the tanks to the wings and use your own skill and judgement. The four inner underwing pylons are angled perpendicular to the lower wing surface, which looks to be correct. The pylons didn't mate absolutely 'flush' to the wing surfaces, so a small amount of corrective work was in order. Each pylon has front and back bomb crutch (shackle) parts - these need to be aligned in the exact correct position, or else the bombs can't be cemented at the correct angle. Each 750-lb bomb is a standard two-part item, with alignment circles to indicate where they should be cemented to the crutches. The instructions seem to suggest that the fins should be in the '+' position, but in fact they need to be in the 'x' position, which is implied by the crutch attachment points anyway. These bombs were also painted olive drab, with a yellow nose band and silver fuse. Since the underwing starboard roundel is positioned just behind these pylons, you may want to leave the bombs off until the last moment.
A word on the underwing rockets: the kit is accurate, as these stacked 5-in rockets could be carried outboard of the regular underwing bombs - there is photographic evidence that clearly shows this. I would guess that the kit is also correct in restricting them only to the early (1958) subject. I doubt that combat practice in Vietnam would have allowed a large aircraft such as the B-57 to run the risk of heavy gunfire at low altitudes, just so it could fire off a few unguided rockets. Not to mention the fact that the B-57 mainly operated at night. The rockets themselves look very good - in fact, I would say that they are in some ways superior to those supplied with the Academy F-84E/G. The Academy rockets have oddly shaped nose sections - although the pylons are very detailed - and are one of the few shortcomings in an otherwise excellent kit. So, these Italeri rockets might well escape the spares box.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
All undercarriage bays and door insides were painted chromate yellow. After doing a dry-fit test, I think there should be no problems in building a 'wheels-up' model, although part of the protruding main undercarriage leg sockets would need to be cut away. All bays, doors and undercarriage legs have very good detail. The wheel detail is good, but there is no treading on the tires. The mainwheel bays look deep enough, but when compared to the mainwheel assembly, they are obviously not as deep as they should be. Each main undercarriage leg has one piece only, with an integral support strut. The aforementioned sockets need to be slightly trimmed to ensure a perfect fit. Each main undercarriage door consists of large section that needs to be cut in two for 'wheels-down' kit. The outer part fits onto the main undercarriage leg, but the inner part needs to be manually positioned at the edge of the bay - and left to set for some time. The same is true of a very small outer section designed to cover that part of each bay that protrudes into the engine fairing. This should be fitted before any other part of the undercarriage, and it will partially cover the main outer door section. Because of issues like this, everything should be fully prepainted before final assembly. Looking at either main undercarriage assembly side-on, one can see that the bottom edges of the main inner and outer doors both slope downwards. Intuitively, this seems to be wrong, but it is actually correct.
All parts of the nose undercarriage should also be pre-painted. Here, there is also a single-piece leg part. The leg and wheels should be attached before the bay doors. The doors (again, a single part cut in two) need to be manually positioned, and should angle slightly outwards. If I was nit-picking, I would say that the nosewheel assembly looks slightly too wide to actually fit in the bay. On the other hand, the nosewheel bay certainly looks plenty deep enough. The completed model shows a correct 'nose down' attitude, although I can't say just how pronounced that should be.
Belatedly, I completed the cockpit - the nature of the parts fit allowed me to leave this stage in abeyance for as long as I wanted. The cockpit interior was painted mainly flat black, with some areas in gloss gull grey. The crisply detailed instrument panels (no decals, as usual) were hand painted and slipped easily into place. Each three-part seat (main seat, side rests) was painted mainly gloss gull grey and gloss black, and the pre-molded straps were painted tan. In order to accommodate all the electronic equipment, the back seat was offset slightly to port - that isn't apparent here, which isn't really surprising. The two-piece control column was easily inserted with a tweezers. There is a single-piece main canopy, with a separate forward section that has a windscreen wiper molded in place. It is possible to complete the kit with the canopy open (i.e., tilted up). This is done using a special support part (13A), which is positioned between the seats, and looks quite accurate. This part has a central strut that needs to be cut away if the canopy is to be closed. The closed canopy fit isn't perfect, with some work needed at the back to give a flush fuselage/canopy join.
I finally attached the flaps, leaving them to set at roughly a 35-degree angle. In reality, they could probably droop quite a bit more. The flap and wing interior areas were all painted chromate yellow, as were the airbrake interiors and bays. The airbrake struts were painted chromate and silver. The airbrake detail is good, but nothing to get too excited about. All that was left was an assortment of fairings and aerials. Construction step 3 shows a small port-side fuselage scoop (part 22A), just above the wing trailing edge. This does not actually exist, and should not be confused with the real 22A, which is a small antenna underneath the nose. Step 7 shows a pair of antennae attached to the underside of the fuselage, aft of the wings. These also don't exist. All these parts look as if they belong to a B-57G. I would guess that current version of the instruction leaflet was adapted from a B-57G leaflet produced previously.
In theory, this paint job should have caused no problems, with the standard USAF South-East Asian scheme. This is FS 30219 tan (Hu 118), FS 34012 medium green (Hu 117), and FS 34079 dark green (Hu 116) - not 34097, as called in the kit. That's probably just a typo, even though 34097 is a recognised FS shade. No surprises for guessing that the old leaflet was right. The underside is matt black (Hu 33). Studying the camouflage pattern on the leaflet revealed a problem: the pattern didn't agree with the box artwork, or with actual photographs - or with the original leaflet. Here are the old and new paint guides:
Of course, there were substantial pattern variations in practice - and even between the schemes on the two leaflets. Here, however, it looked as if the tan and medium green areas were accidentally switched. Note that there is a tan patch underneath the centre of the cockpit on each side. If this wasn't there, then I don't think the nose artwork found on many aircraft would be positioned there either. Bearing all this in mind, I went ahead with what looked to me to be a reasonably accurate scheme, based mainly on the old leaflet, and partially on some photographs.
For the record, option 'B' is given as a matt black finish, but I this should actually be a gloss finish. Option 'C' is given as all natural metal. On the original leaflet, the overall colour for this version is given as USAF light grey (FS 36118). In this case, I think the new instructions are right.
The Zanchetti decals are well up to standard, being very thin, very accurate, well-defined and having excellent adhesion. They are slightly glossier than the old Cartograf decals, but that disappeared under Humbrol MattCote. For my subject, there was only a very small section on the sheet - it's near the lower right, with the very small national markings. The instructions are misleading in that they suggest that larger markings should be used, but the decals are the right size, judging by photographs. Although the decal sheet is clearly split into a number of areas, a couple of items required for the camouflaged version were actually in an adjacent part of the sheet.
In terms of both length and wingspan, this model scales out very close to the quoted dimensions - perhaps very marginally short on both counts. Apart from the minor problems raised during the review, I couldn't see any other flaws of note. Given the size of the aircraft, there is always the chance that some features or panels are slightly out of position, or the wrong size. I had too much fun building this kit to worry too much about that possibility, and I have faith in Italeri's reputation for basic accuracy.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
My main source of background information was from the B-57 articles written
by Joe Baugher. These are part of an enormous body of work covering a huge
number of US military aircraft. Joe's main home page is:
home.att.net/~jbaugher/.
This has links to all the aircraft information, plus separate links to US
military aircraft serial numbers. An alternate home page for some of the
aircraft articles is:
www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/baugher_us/.
Most of the referenced pages are on the first site, but I found a second set of
older Canberra pages on this site through Yahoo. This differs in having the
relevant aircraft serial information listed within the B-57 articles themselves.
The B-57 index URL is:
www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/baugher_us/b057i.html.
Additional online reference material can be found at the Wright-Patterson AFB museum site. Just enter 'B-57' and/or 'Canberra' on the search page. Most of the pages listed from the search will have photos attached. One B-57B picture from 1956 clearly shows a gloss-black aircraft with stacked underwing rockets on the outboard pylons, thus answering two of my questions at once.
For the Vietnam operations, my main printed reference was the Wings of Fame Journal, Vol. 19 - B-57 Canberra in Vietnam.
Including the time spent on research, and on writing this review, I must have expended between 80 to 90 hours on this kit, over about three-and-a-half weeks. That's a lot of time to spend on just one kit in such a short time, but I was always ready to return to it no matter how much time I'd already spent. The enjoyment was as much in the building as in seeing the final result, which is the way I want it to be. This is an excellent kit of a very elegant aircraft. It remains a bit of a mystery as to why some of the other big manufacturers haven't tackled the Canberra. Based on what seems to sell these days, and what Hasegawa, Academy et al are producing right now, I would have thought that a new Canberra tooling would be a huge success. On the other hand, such a kit might be very, very expensive. In most parts of the world, the Italeri B-57 costs considerably less than a Tamiya Bf 109 or P-51, but offers by far the more rewarding experience, in my opinion. I now have to face the prospect that most kits I build from now on won't be as enjoyable as this, but I suppose I can always hope.
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